A Little Message About Dreams (Patreon)

(And by "little" I mean "somewhat long and rambling" and I'm sorry?)

So last week (has it been a week? Seriously, my sense of time has been completely disordered because this week broke my brain.) I mentioned a moment in a movie where a character gets their dream. They get to hold it in their hands and just bask in it. I can tell you, it's an amazing feeling. But then that characters suddenly looks around and says, "What happens now?" And oh. Oh how that moment resonated.

When I got the call from my agent that he'd sold my first book, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer and the sequel, I was...well, I was cautious optimistic. Which my agent thought was hilarious. I have a weird reaction to good news--if it seems too good, I don't trust it. At all. I told him I wouldn't believe the book deal until I had the contract in my hands. Like, actually physically in my hands and it was signed. Which in publishing time means I would have to be cautiously optimistic for at least three months. (Contracts in publishing are a lengthy and strange process.) He laughed and kept laughing until he realized that I was dead serious.

J: The book is sold. Trust me on this.

Me: Sure, yeah, it's not that I don't trust you...but I have a learned response to things I'm really excited about and that is to completely shut down like I'm a cold war spy and I'm hoarding secrets from the pentagon. 

J: ...okay.

Me: You haven't known me long, so just know that I don't sound like it, but I'm thrilled. I'm ecstatic. But you would have no idea by looking at me or talking to me.

J: ...?

Me: Let's just say that I had a parent who would punish by taking away the thing you love most, and I learned the lesson too well and now I can't seem to unlearn it. I'm thrilled, really I am. I promise.

J: Just promise me you'll celebrate. This is a huge win. Be happy.

And that's the thing, I was happy. So happy! I'd been dreaming of publishing a book since I was a child. As in, I actually don't remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer. This was a dream I'd been holding onto tight for almost three decades at that point. A dream everyone said would never happen. I mean, statistically, it can't happen for everyone. We can't all be published. I worked hard and I was lucky and here was my dream. IN MY HANDS.

And because my brain can't let me have nice things, that feeling of absolute rapture didn't last very long. My brain likes to kill optimism with facts. I'm one of those people that have to have back up plans ready in case something goes sideways, which means I have to think of all the terrible things that can go wrong. And honestly? I wasn't prepared for my dream to come true. I mean, I was but logistically I was not...because I'd never imagined past that point. Most of us don't think past the moment where we get the dream. I mean, what does happen now? There were a ton of things I wasn't prepared for. Most of them were things I could fix through research--how do I get paid? Do I quit my job? How do taxes work? Crap, does that mean I have to find an accountant? How does one do that? How do I get a website? Do I have to do social media? How is it going to feel when people read my book...and hate it? What if they love it? What if they don't care?

There's also a surprising amount of work writers have to do that have nothing to do with actual writing. I wasn't ready for that, either.

It's...a little overwhelming. First, the accountant question took way too long to occur to me and I ended up paying a ton in taxes because I'd missed a few quarterly payments. (I'd only ever had minimum wage jobs and graduate assitanceships before this. I had no need of an accountant ever in my life. As far as I was concerned, accounts were for rich people.) I didn't know any authors locally to me, and I didn't know anyone in KidLit, so I didn't know who to talk to and find all of this stuff out. (All of my writer friends were poets, screenwriters, or wrote literary fiction. Those fields are vastly different from young adult.) 

I did quit my job, which is usually a terrible idea when you first sell a book. Publishing pays infrequently and in sometimes strange intervals and most people need a steady paycheck and health insurance. (A lot of authors don't quite their day job until book four or five.) Only, my job sucked. I didn't make much, I didn't have health insurance, and my paychecks had started to bounce. I mean, I got another day job eventually, but I was able to coast for a few months between my advance and my husband's paycheck and what we were saving on child care with me home. Child care in Seattle is no joke. I've never, ever been able to afford it. I've always had to cobble together a system of friends and trade babysitting.

Most of these things can be fixed by research. What I wasn't prepared for was all the FEELINGS. (Spoiler alert--I'm never prepared for feelings.)

Turns out publishing a little stressful. I learned early to not read reviews--even good ones. A bad review made me question my skill set and a good review made me worried that I couldn't do it again. There's no winning there, at least not for me. For the record, it's cool if people don't like my books. We all have different tastes and I'm well aware that my humor is an acquired taste. I just don't need to read about it? Which is hard to avoid because sometimes people tag you in negative reviews which I don't understand at all. 

The thing was, that wasn't the hard part. Suddenly, there's pressure to write a good book. I wrote Hold Me Closer, Necromancer as my thesis to graduate. I didn't think anyone was going to read it. Suddenly people were and now there were expectations. I'd only ever written one novel and I had no idea if I could do it again. I'd also moved right before I sold it and I now lived in an expensive city with a small child and I knew exactly zero local writers. I had all of these anxious, stressed out, panic feelings and I couldn't talk about them to anyone. I had achieved the dream and I had to pretend it was all rainbows and glitter or people got mad. Which, I get. No one wants to hear someone complaining about a dream. I made the mistake once of posting a stress status update on my personal FB and one of my friends told me I didn't get to complain because I was published. I apologized, because on one hand, he was right. But I also said, "Look, I get it and I'm sorry, but you need to know that I'm jealous of your steady paychecks and health insurance."

...and he was surprised I didn't have health insurance through my husband. My husband, who works at a tattoo shop. Tattoo shops, as a rule, do not hand out health insurance. In fact the shop my husband landed in when we moved to Seattle actually does give insurance to their counter staff and body piercers (which is what he does) and that is shocking. I had never heard of a shop doing that, and he'd worked in shops in Alaska, Louisiana, Texas, and a few in Washington.  It's one of the reasons we can't leave the area. He's in too good of a shop. So it's a stretch that even he has that. Adding me would take up half a paycheck and we can't swing that. 

I want to be clear--I never though I'd get rich publishing. I had done enough research to know that. It was mostly that I was freaked out because I wasn't sure I could write book two and that was exacerbated by the fact that sometimes we didn't have enough money to heat our crappy house. (Which had oil heat and we later found out absolutely no insulation beyond a few handfuls of crumpled news paper. I'm not exaggerating. We talked to the guy that bought our house from our former landlord. When he opened up the walls, he found a little newspaper and that was it. Also part of the house was held up by a stump. I mean, we could see light coming in around the fireplace. I wasn't surprised by any of this.) 

Basically, I didn't know what I was doing and was very, very cognizant of that fact. And I had to pretend that everything was cool. None of my teachers had ever taught us the practical side of writing. How to handle, well, anything. And trust me, we asked. They never went over agents, contracts, the query process, payment schedules, anything.

I'm also not saying that we lived in poverty, we just had a very paycheck to paycheck existence. There's a very feast or famine cycle in publishing--and a lot of the arts--and I was trying to navigate it and balance raising a small child. Sometimes, we were fine. Sometimes I had to wear gloves and a jacket and hat in my own house as I typed. I distinctly remember one day calling my mom from a Target parking lot and bursting into tears because I couldn't afford toilet paper at the moment and I needed to use her credit card for some basics. I was an adult with a kid and I hated that my mom still needed to help me on occasion because I felt like she'd already done her job. It might have been fine if Man Friend's job was a steady one, but his job is just as feast or famine as mine which means sometimes we can save up a cushion and sometimes we have to quickly deplete it.

Again, not complaining about my broke-ass days. We had a roof. My family and friends are awesome and I never had to worry about a meal. I have an amazing support system, and someone is always willing to feed me. (Am I like a stray dog? Sometimes.) My problem was...I couldn't talk about it. I'm someone who deals with stress by vocalizing--I process by talking. And I felt doubly shitty because it felt wrong to have negative feelings about a dream I worked hard for and that other people wanted--a dream that I still love. I love being a writer. I love getting to hold my books in my hand. It feels deeply surreal to see them on a library shelf. But since I didn't know any other commercially published writers at the time and I didn't know that these feelings were normal, I felt broken. I thought there was something wrong with me that I felt this way and I didn't know how to deal with it.

I honestly think about that moment at Target a lot. I wonder how many people have emotional breakdowns in parking lots.

After a while, I made writer friends. And I hesitantly brought up my feelings...and of course it turned out that it's totally normal. Just like any other big life change, it brings good with the bad and that's okay. People just don't talk about it. It doesn't mean that we're not happy and over the moon about getting our dream. That we're not grateful...We just didn't truly believe that we'd get it and when we did we were surprised that like everything else in the world, it wasn't perfect. 

It also made me think about the best writing advice I got in grad school, which oddly enough had nothing to do with the actual writing process. One of my professors was sitting next to me in the bar and she told me (I'm paraphrasing obviously), "Look, if you're trying to get published to solve something inside you? Don't. The only problem getting published solves is the problem of not being published. Anything else inside you? It's going to make that infinitely worse. Any other problems? Take those to therapy."

It was the best advice. It's the advice I tell writers all the time. It's the reason why, when a friend of mine sells their first book, I tell them, "That's great. Seriously wonderful. Celebrate this achievement hard. And let's get a drink or a cup of coffee, because I'm going to tell you things, and they are going to bum you out and I'm sorry. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I want you to be prepared, because that way when those feelings do appear, you're not ambushed by them. You know they're normal."

You can still be happy about your dream, be grateful, and understand you're lucky while also  acknowledging that there will be days you'll end up crying in a Target parking lot over some toilet paper.

Just, you know, maybe don't post it on facebook.

That's why my DMs are always open to new writers or writers aspiring to be published. They're always open on here.

I hope you're all doing okay out there and sorry about the serious post. I'll get back to wackiness shortly, promise.

-Lish